Page 11 of What Hurts Us

“Yeah, when you weren’t all moon-eyed all over Brannan,” Austin quipped with a good-natured wink.

The comment stung like a thousand murder hornets.

Beth raised her brows. “You were withChaseBrannan?”

I could feel Shane and Lauren’s eyes on me. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck, and heat blazed across my cheeks. What I wouldn’t give to go back in time, get my dinner to go, and hide in my apartment listening to a symphony of blenders roaring through paper-thin drywall.

“Oh, me and Chase? We weren’t serious.” I waved it off as though it was nothing. And to Chase, it hadn’t been anything. But me…

I hadn’t been lying when I jokingly told Officer Fletcher that he wasn’t my type.

I didn’t date cops.

Not anymore.

Still, that didn’t mean I wasn’t a glutton for punishment. I prided myself in having brass ovaries, but my willpower only went so far. When presented with the temptation of getting a little gossip about an old flame, the answer was always yes. “How, um… How’s he doing?” I asked. “Chase, I mean.”

Austin shifted uncomfortably.Way to go, Layla. It’s totally normal to ask a nearly random stranger about a former fling.He studied his shoes. “I think he’s doing alright.” Almost reluctantly, he added, “Things with Bridget are … they’re tough. But she’s tough, too. Bridget finally left Kingsley a few weeks ago, and she and Chase are together now. She’s got a long road of recovery ahead of her, but it looks like things might finally fall into place for them.”

“Good. That’s good.” I forced a thin smile and turned to Beth. “So, what are y’all doing in Falls Creek? Are you guys just visiting?”

“No, I moved here a few weeks ago. I got a job at the university in Chapel Hill while I finish my master’s degree.” She elbowed Austin in the gut. “Overprotective ogre of a big brother had seventy-two hours off from the fire department and came to make sure I was staying out of trouble.”

“Brothers are annoying like that,” I said with a laugh, thinking about mine. “But you live here in Falls Creek?”

She nodded. “It’s adorable here and so much cheaper than renting in the city.”

While Tiffany stopped by to take their drink orders, Beth and I exchanged numbers. It would be nice to know someone else in town.

When I returned to my seat, I didn’t miss the way Shane was studying Beth. Lauren smacked her hands on the table. “Spill.”

Playing dumb, I asked, “Spill what?”

She scoffed. “The hunky firefighter? That look on your face when he brought up whoever the hell ‘Brannan’ is?”

“It’s nothing,” I said all too quickly, but my denial didn’t stop the memories from floating through my mind.

I was the one who had been naïve, thinking I could make him fall for me even though he was clearly hung up on someone else.

To him, it had been a few months of stress-relieving hook-ups. To me, I saw a potential future. But the writing on the wall was there. He was in love with someone who wasn’t me. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I cared or listened, I would never have been able to change that.

I left Beaufort with a raw, aching heart and a resolution to spend the next few months falling back in love with myself.

Yeah, yeah. It was cliché as hell. Still, swearing off men—and more importantly, penises—had actually done me some good.

I felt lighter. Happier. More focused at work. I was more comfortable being alone with my thoughts. I wasn’t trying to decode what a certain text meant.

Everyone knew that the letter “K” with a period as a text meant the sender was pissed. But what about “kay” without the ‘O?’ Had he been on duty and couldn’t type “okay?” Was he blowing me off? Had I come on too strong?

The overthinking left me perpetually exhausted.

When the conversation with Lauren and Shane wrapped up, I said my goodbyes and waved at Austin and Beth. My phone rang as I slung my bag across my body and walked down the sidewalk to my car. I smiled as I pressed it to my ear. “Khale joon!”

“Layla joon!” my aunt sing-songed before exploding into rambling Farsi, demanding to know why I had been in town for over a month and hadn’t come by the Ballentine House yet.

My Aunt Sepideh ran a quaint bed-and-breakfast in an unincorporated part of the county, just outside of Falls Creek. When I was younger, I loved leaving the hustle and bustle of Chapel Hill and going to visit. My brother and I would race through the fruit trees that dotted the sprawling fields, then cool off by swimming in the creek. We would help turn over the rooms, cottages, and cabins when guests checked out. Sometimes I would pitch in to prepare meals and snacks in the kitchen. The property looked like it was straight out of a storybook. A wave of nostalgia crashed into me.

I had crisscrossed the country more than I could count; traveled internationally when I was between assignments. But for the first time in a long time, I was back home.

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